ON THE PURCHASING POWER OF WAGES. 831 



employed for fifty weeks in the year and for six full days in 

 the week, a regularity of employment which is highly improb- 

 able in the case of the artisan, and not more likely in that of 

 the labourer, whose employment depends on the hiring of the 

 artisan. In the case of the agricultural labourer, I am taking 

 the most highly paid service (that of piecework in harvest time) 

 which is engaged on the farm, for even in Young's time ordi- 

 nary and regular agricultural labour seldom gets more than 

 7-y. a week, and Young constantly insists that wages have greatly 

 risen within twenty years of the date at which he composed his 

 Tours l . His average of thirty nine localities is js. icd. a week. 

 It is of course very possible that the wages ordinarily 

 earned by artisans and unskilled labourers were supplemented 

 by the earnings of their wives and children, though they 

 never were to the impossible extent which Young contem- 

 plates and quotes as normal, under which the earnings of a 

 labourer with his family are frequently represented as in 

 excess of the profits of a moderate-sized farm. Nor must 

 too much weight be given to bye-industries. They are 

 notoriously remunerated in the vast majority of cases at less 

 than the labour would be if it were engaged on the ordinary 

 industry in which the agent is reputed to be generally occu- 

 pied. There are instances at once conceivable and actual, 

 in which the bye-industry is of considerable significance, as 

 for example when it represents a product which is consumed 

 by the family, and from which therefore a saving in the 

 ordinary expenditure of the household is effected, or when 

 the ordinary avocations of the workman are so necessarily 

 circumscribed, as in small farming, or in occupations in which 

 employment is precarious, that the working hours of the 

 family during the year would fall far behind the capacity for 

 work whkh the family possessed Such was the domestic 

 linen-spinning and weaving of Ulster, such was much of the 

 woollen-weaving of North Lancashire and West Yorkshire, and 

 such in the time 'of Arthur Young was the character of much 



1 Sec, for example, Eastern Tour, vol. iv. p. 31*. 



